Le Camp des Saints is a 1970s anti-immigration novel that remains eternally relevant due to the efforts of pro–immigration activists. Every few months a new op-ed appears somewhere informing the reader that this book exists and is evil and racist. Like Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, it’s hard to defend, easy to mock, and a useful albatross to hang around your opposition’s neck. Voltaire said “oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.” Saints is such an effective clown nose that it will remain in print for the next hundred years, or forever.

The setting is a dystopia. Overpopulation has turned the Third World into a simmering Malebolge of starvation and poverty, and a sea of refugees threaten to overwhelm the West (while deluded liberal politicians tunnel holes in the walls). The crisis reaches a head when an army of Indians (enabled by a weak, dissimulating “atheist philosopher” called Ballan) hijack a fleet and sail for France. As the armada approaches, the government faces a choice: should the refugees be allowed in? They deliberately only packed enough supplies for a one-way trip, and they’ll die if turned away.

To state the obvious, the book is indeed bigoted. Raspail does not like foreigners. They’re described as “a mass of human flesh”, “a million flailing savages”, “a river of sperm”, “unbridled, menacing hordes”, “cholera-ridden and leprous wretches”, “columns of ants on the march”, a “numberless, miserable mass”, “a welter of dung and debauch”, and more. Tolkien didn’t write about orcs with such vituperation.

Saints might be the most splenetic book to achieve mainstream success in a century.  It’s written in squalling, thundering prose that seems shouted at the reader through a bullhorn. Characters are illustrated in one broad stroke, and usually never a second one. In the first pages we meet the first of many strawmen of the pro-immigration left – a white college kid who has embraced Islam and atheism simultaneously (?), is helping the refugees make landfall so they can destroy French culture (?!) and who wants to rape his sister (?!?!). But first he’s going to smoke pot and shoot dope on the beach. This character amazed me: caricatures that broad normally only appear in Jack Chick tracts.

Saints is a queasy and miserable nightmare. I doubt many finished it, and the ones who did probably didn’t immediately plan a re-read. But it has an intensity to it, and once you adjust to the content, it’s strangely readable. Raspail has a “Nouveau French” prose style that’s equal parts classicist and camp (“there was no lack of clever folk, willing, from the start, to spread endless layers of verbal cream, spurting thick and unctuous from the udders of their minds”). It’s a book written out of passion, not cynicism.

The moral issues Saints raises are interesting and important, however much you disagree with the book’s handling of them.

Race is a stalking horse for Raspail’s true issue: overpopulation. The Indians aren’t bad because they’re Indians, they’re bad because there are too many of them. They reproduced to excess, used up all their country’s resources, and now want to take other countries down with them. This might seem a distinction without a difference, but it creates a covalence with many thinkers and intellectuals from the period, not all of whom were on the far right.

Overpopulation was much on the public mind in the 70s (and 80s, and 90s). The ghost of Thomas Malthus^[1](For the record, Malthus was an original and clever thinker, but he made mistakes. His argument was that human population must increase exponentially – two people, four people, eight people … Continue reading) began stirring and rattling chains. “The population is doubling every forty years! How will we feed, clothe and house them all? What happens to the environment? We’re going to be back in the bad old days: wars, famines, plagues, deforestation. Wouldn’t it be kinder for everyone if we could…*cough*…control the population somehow?”

This is why your Infowars-obsessed dad keeps finding quotes by “elites” such as Ted Turner about reducing the population. It’s also the reason The Camp of the Saints was published by a mainstream press and read by academics, instead of “published” by a hand-cranked press at a neo-Nazi farmstead and “read” by the prosecution at the author’s own hate speech trial. “There’s too many people, and lots of them will have to die,” absolutely wasn’t a fringe viewpoint fifty years ago, and Raspail’s hymn had many voices in the choir, although most hid their views in liberal language.

In 1968, Paul Erlich wrote The Population Bomb, full of cheery asides like “the battle to feed all of humanity is over”, and “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and got its author on NBC’s Tonight Show. In 1995 Lester R. Brown wrote a book called Who Will Feed China? (making China sound like the monster in Little Shop of Horrors, ravenously eating), complete with a photo of sad-looking Chinese kids on the cover. Radical leftist Pentti Linkola spent decades recommending drastic population reductions by coercive means, as seen in his famous “lifeboat ethics” metaphor.

“What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”

Note that these brutal “sever the extra hands” solutions were always directed at brown people. White people used far more than their share of the planet’s resources, but somehow it was always the mother in Senegal with seven children dooming the world. It’s an uncomfortable legacy that the left has spent a lot of time grappling with since (Google “eco-fascism” for more), and if you want to throw tomatoes at Raspail, save a few ripe ones for the 70s environmentalist movement, too.

But how the years condemn. Here’s Raspail’s introduction.

I HAD WANTED TO WRITE a lengthy preface to explain my position and show that this is no wild-eyed dream; that even if the specific action, symbolic as it is, may seem farfetched, the fact remains that we are inevitably heading for something of the sort. We need only glance at the awesome population figures predicted for the year 2000, i.e., twenty-eight years from now: seven billion people, only nine hundred million of whom will be white.

This year arrived twenty years ago, but Raspail’s world did not come with it. Something happened instead that he didn’t expect: the Third World began rising out of poverty. The choice between saving the poor and saving ourselves never occurred: we can do both. The game is survival is not always zero-sum.

But I’m interested in the moral quandary Raspail poses. First, let’s grant his scenario. A million Indians are waiting to enter France. If they, they’ll destroy Western civilization (in the same sense that Spanish invasion of the new world “destroyed” the Meso-American civilizations). Don’t ask questions. This is the choice. What’s the correct thing to do?

I think the refugees should still be allowed in. Killing a million people is bad. And although the death of Western civilization might be worse, you’re weighing a certain bad at probability 1 (a million people will definitely die if we sink the ships), vs a maybe-bad at probability <1. How sure are we that Western civilization will be destroyed? We might have misunderstood the situation. It might be that Western civilization passes without mass suffering. The two evils aren’t equivalent. Throwing a brick blindly into a crowded shopping mall isn’t the same as throwing it in a remote wilderness, even though you can conceivably injure people in both cases.

Comparisons between Third World immigrants and Spanish conquistadors can only take us so far. Spain didn’t wipe out the Meso-American empires by flooding them with sheer numbers of Spaniards. They wiped them out with a superior technology base (steel, firearms, horses), as well as novel diseases that the natives lacked immunity to. This isn’t the case with refugees. They’re limited in their ability to cause harm. This isn’t to say there aren’t issues associated with immigration, but it’s not the same set of issues raised by an invading army or a superplague.

Lastly, we have to be pragmatic. If Western civilization is so fragile that a million people on ramshackle boats can overwhelm it, it was weak and wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. It may as well help some people as it falls.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was an Argentinian author, and The Invention of Morel (1940) is his most famous work.

At 100 pages long, the book is sleek and deadly, like one of those rockets with every planar surface graded away to minimize wind drag. It evolves Siddhartha-like through several distinct forms: a Robinson Crusoe-like adventure tale of a man surviving on an island, then a “William Wilson”-like horror story about doubles and dopplegangers, then a disturbing science fiction tale from the speculative side. Prominence romance elements keep the story anchored throughout, although it’s not romance of the usual kind.

The island-stranded protagonist doesn’t warrant a backstory: he has done something bad and is a fugitive from justice; that’s all we know. He’s not alone on the island: there are some dwellings that are inhabited by strange tourists. He soon grows afraid of these people, and not because he thinks they might report him to the police. There’s something very peculiar about them. Their party never ends. They play two pop songs – over and over – until the sound seems hammered permanently into the air.

In time, he notices a beautiful young woman. He’s attracted to her – even though there’s something unusual about her too. She doesn’t react to him, and she behaves as if he’s not there. Confusion about the island and where exactly he’s ended up cause him to explore, find things he’s not supposed to find, and make some world-shattering (or mind-shattering) discoveries.

Adolfo Bioy Casares is often compared to Borges. They were friends, countrymen, colleagues. Bioy’s imaginative faculties are dimmer than Borges, but he’s more successful as a teller of tales.  Borges work is a little like a puzzle box: there’s satisfaction in watching pieces slide together and a solution appear, but often there’s not really a story there. Bioy is a lot like Edgar Allen Poe (or, hell, Edogawa Rampo) – he takes dry ideas and wraps human flesh around them, making his scenarios seem real and scary. The story’s third act is as nailbitingly intense as anything I’ve read in recent memory.

Invention of Morel is a jostle of influences and sources, both fictional and nonfictional. HG Wells The Island of Dr Moreau is a pretty obvious inspiration (Mor-el/Mor-oh). The character of Faustine is based on silent film star Louise Brooks, who Bioy was reportedly obsessed with. But that’s the interesting thing – did he ever really know her?

Louise Brooks was famous for her pictures, maybe immortal because of them, but an actress’s fame is a kind of living death. Brooks is going to smile and giggle and tempt in Pandora’s Box for a thousand years, or however long people still watch it…but the smile will be cold, the laughter will be as robotic as that of a coin-operated machine, she’ll walk eternal steps dictated by a film director. The real Louise Brooks died long ago. The fake one lives on, the way an insect’s molted shell often outlasts the soft, pulpous creature that crawled out of it. But which of the two did Bioy fall in love with? Certain primitive humans think cameras steal souls, and maybe they’re right to.

Nonfiction influences include Malthus’s economic theories, which end up joined with the book’s primary concerns in an interesting way, and the de Broglie hypothesis of matter being made up of waves. More generally, it plays on terms set  by George Berkeley’s subjective idealism – the idea that perception is king, and that physical objects only exist to the extent that our senses perceive them. The idea is that if you overlay a combinations of visual, audible, tactile (etc) data using a machine, you will have, in some sense, created the thing you’re depicting. Bioy’s version of this technology is vague and impossible, but it’s not altogether absurd as a concept. A lot of things in this universe seem to hinge upon observation. And a lot of technically nonexistent things (such as nations) exist because we will them out of the ether.

The Invention of Morel seems well ahead of the curve, which is generally where you want science fiction to be. It presages things like the parasocial relationships of the online era. I enjoy books that drag together unlike influences together like oxen and make them pull the ploughshare of a story, and few achieve this with Bioy’s skill.

The Castle of Otranto was meant as a love letter to the past; instead, it inspired the future. The book’s setting—an ancient castle filled with sinister happenings, depraved nobles, and a haunting sense of loss—proved astonishingly popular, inspiring the Gothic literary movement. Books as diverse as Frankenstein, Titus Groan, The Turn of the Screw, Dracula, Northanger Abbey, A Rebours, Interview with the Vampire, the House of Leaves, and even Harry Potter all bear the mark of Otranto and its visions of stone and stain-glass.

The book’s historical setting is loose. Walpole was interested in the High Middle Ages but knew little about them, and Otranto’s castle is haunted by anachronisms as well as ghosts. Characters duel with fencing sabres, which wouldn’t be invented for hundreds of years. The confrontation between Manfred and Theodore is interrupted by the arrival of the “Marquis of Vicenza“, but the title of marquis/marquess/marchese was not used in Italy in the period.

In a literal sense Walpole lived closer to the Middle Ages than we do, but in a scholastic sense he lived further away. Modern medievalists have access to thousands of primary sources, scanned and translated and annotated, but in the 18th century Walpole was limited to whatever books he had in his personal library (or that of Cambridge University, where he studied). 21st century technology gives us a high-powered telescope back to the past; Walpole was forced to peer through cracked, foggy spectacles. He himself complained about the poverty of the existing scholarship.  “…The original evidence is wondrous slender.”

But although Otranto never echoes the Middle Ages very strongly, this too became a Gothic hallmark. The genre has a grand, dislocated effect—part history, part myth, part fairytale, part nightmare—that seems to float outside history. It has the slippery heat of an opium dream; the marmoreal coldness of a stone gargoyle. 20th century authors such as MR James and Shirley Jackson were not above turning out minimally-updated variants of the Otranto formula: tense and fraught tales of things that go bump in the night.

The story: despotic tyrant Manfred loses his son in a tragic and absurd accident, on the day the boy was to marry the princess of a neighboring kingdom. He attempts to marry the girl himself, and consummate their nuptials on the spot (perhaps he was motivated by more than desire to preserve his bloodline), but she escapes, leading him on a chase through the vaults of Castle Otranto. He sees things that are not real, and hears creaking sounds when there’s nothing that could be making them. Hanging over this is an ancient prophecy; “”that the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it””. Manfred is doomed. The past—represented by the ancient Otranto castle—is reaching towards him, and it will take from him everything he has.

This is a popular (and perhaps central) Gothic idea: that houses and dynasties, however ancient and grand, all eventually die. Throw a ball in the air, and it will fall. Throw a cathedral spire into the air, and it will fall. Even when the spire is lofted atop a mighty edifice arches, gables, tympanums, archivolts, balustrades, and buttresses, even if it’s sanctified by prayers and the blood and bones of saints, it will still fall. That’s the way of things: they come crashing down. Gravity is inescapable, as is the entropy behind it, and the only certainty is collapse. Gothicism is the literature of dust.

Walpole is modern in his outlook. He plays metafictional games, framing the book as a “lost work” that he is the translator of (needless to say, several of his contemporaries actually thought this was true!). Amusingly, he throws critical brickbats at his own work.

“It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author’s defects. I could wish he had grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this: that “the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.” I doubt whether, in his time, any more than at present, ambition curbed its appetite of dominion from the dread of so remote a punishment. And yet this moral is weakened by that less direct insinuation, that even such anathema may be diverted by devotion to St. Nicholas. Here the interest of the Monk plainly gets the better of the judgment of the author. However, with all its faults, I have no doubt but the English reader will be pleased with a sight of this performance.”

The story is funny—when and why did Gothic horror decide to be grim and humorless? The scenes where Manfred upbraids his slow-witted castle guards are almost out of Blackadder, and elsewhere Walpole is nearly as pithy and quotable as Oscar Wilde. “A bystander often sees more of the game than those that play”. Again, he appears to be taking the piss out of himself. The “translator” notes that the story contains “no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions.” This is the same story that has hilarious Romantic camp like “The gentle maid, whose hapless tale / these melancholy pages speak; / say, gracious lady, shall she fail / To draw the tear a down from thy cheek?”

Most literary fads are associated with eras, intellectuals, social movements, and locations. Gothicism is somewhat unique in that’s associated with architecture. Although Gothic books can be set anywhere (the memorable Vathek by William Beckford has a Middle East locale), the genre’s most at home in huge, ornate castles.

Why are castles the default Gothic setting? They’re creepy. They’re also useful to the writer. They can plausibly contain secret passages, hidden vaults, deathtraps, dungeons, and so on. And they’re isolated. A castle’s high walls don’t just keep outsiders out, they keep insiders in, and in many Gothic tales they can seem like prisons. The BBC comedy Fawlty Towers derived much of its humor from the gathering tension of these people stuck inside a hotel. It’s a pressure cooker that you know is going to explode. Likewise, the best gothic novels induce a feeling of suffocating tension. And it’s all because of of the castles. It’s like you’re falling into a pit while wearing a stiff suit of armor, unable to move or see or breathe.

It’s pointless recommending Otranto. That presumes it’s possible to not read it, which it isn’t. You’ve already read most of it in the form of countless spiritual descendants. This book is inescapable, standing against the literary horizon like its titular castle: